Fox News' Martha MacCallum falsely claimed that businesses are not hiring because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), despite evidence that the healthcare law will actually create jobs and stimulate economic growth.

During the June 15 edition of America's Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum discussed how Hillary Clinton's support for policies designed to reduce income inequality could impact the presidential race. Citing her support for the Affordable Care Act, network contributor Katie Pavlich claimed that the health care law "do[es] nothing to pull people out of poverty." MacCallum agreed, saying, "That is true, businesses you talk to all across the country will tell you" that they're not hiring because of Obamacare. Talking over guest Mary Anne Marsh as she replied, MacCallum demanded to know "why companies are not hiring" if not because of the Affordable Care Act:

But MacCallum's baseless assertion is just the latest effort by conservative media to fearmonger that the ACA would eliminate jobs. In 2014, mediaconsistentlymisread a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, which found that the ACA would create more job opportunities by freeing Americans from job lock, claiming that it would actually eliminate positions, and going so far as to label the law a "job destroyer."

In reality, the CBO's ten-year Budget and Economic Outlook report predicted that the health care law would create jobs while stimulating the economy:

[T]he ACA's subsidies for health insurance will both stimulate demand for health care services and allow low-income households to redirect some of the funds that they would have spent on that care toward the purchase of other goods and services--thereby increasing overall demand. That increase in overall demand while the economy remains somewhat weak will induce some employers to hire more workers or to increase the hours of current employees during that period.

[...]

If changes in incentives lead some workers to reduce the amount of hours they want to work or to leave the labor force altogether, many unemployed workers will be available to take those jobs--so the effect on overall employment of reductions in labor supply will be greatly dampened.

As the Brookings Institute further pointed out in a March 2015 blog post, while it isn't yet possible to definitively evaluate the health care law's impact on employment, it is "not easy to make a convincing case that job gains have lagged since the President signed the health insurance law." The post also noted that "[t]he pace of job growth has actually increased in the past few months as the Administration began to enforce the employer penalty provisions of the law."

Hosts of Fox News' Outnumbered railed against the GOP for lacking a serious alternative health care plan should the Supreme Court rule against the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) tax credits. The plans put forward by Republican lawmakers as alternatives would each result in fewer people enrolled in coverage while paying higher premiums.

The Supreme Court will issue a ruling this month on the King v. Burwelllawsuit, which will determinewhether a subclause in the ACA that sayssubsidies can be disbursed through "Exchanges established by the State" prohibits the IRS from providing tax credits to consumers who bought insurance over the federal exchange.

The hosts of Fox News' Outnumbered criticized President Obama for not having a "plan B if the justices rule against him," but Sandra Smith and Andrea Tantaros turned the focus to congressional Republicans, calling them out for not having "a backup plan" after campaigning for years against the administration to repeal Obamacare. Tantaros called Republicans "lame", and characterized their actions as "inexplicable" and "pathetic":

In fact, Republicans in Congress have come up with five alternative plans if the ACA's subsidies are struck down, but as Vox noted each could lead to "very bizarre policy outcomes that are not good for the individual insurance market," and would result in fewer people enrolled in coverage while paying higher premiums:

Republicans lawmakers have also come up with five alternatives plans to keep the [federal subsidy] dollars flowing. The question is whether they'll do much good. Most of the plans would extend the availability of subsidies, while dismantling other parts of Obamacare. The result would likely be a world that looks much more like America before Obamacare -- where fewer people are enrolled in coverage and are paying higher premiums.

Take, for example, Sen. Ron Johnson's Preserving Freedom and Choice in Health Care Act. It would both extend the Obamacare subsidies and kill the health-care law's individual mandate, the unpopular requirement that nearly all Americans carry health coverage.

Without a requirement to purchase insurance coverage, health economists roundly expect that young, healthy people would no longer buy coverage. This, then, would lead to a spike in premiums as only the really sick people, who use their coverage a lot, opt to buy insurance plans.

The transitional period Johnson's bill imagines is one where the individual market is smaller and a more expensive place to shop.

These types of problems turn up again and again in all five Republican plans. When you try to repeal Obamacare and maintain the law's subsidies, it turns out you end up with some very bizarre policy outcomes that are not good for the individual insurance market.

Both Fox's Sean Hannity and Univision host Jorge Ramos misrepresented the Latino vote by suggesting that if it weren't for the issue of immigration, Hispanics would favor conservative candidates. But not only do Latino voters prioritize multiple issues in addition to immigration, on those issues they are far more likely to support progressive reforms than Ramos and Hannity suggested.

On the April 15 edition of his Fox show, Hannity misleadingly claimed that Hispanics "generally speaking" were "conservative on social issues," and suggested that the sole reason Latinos might not vote for Hispanic GOP presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio was their anti-immigration stances. Ramos agreed, and claimed that the reason Hispanics tend to vote for Democrats was entirely due to immigration:

RAMOS: Republicans, I think, they've missed a huge opportunity, because when it comes to values, they're close to the Hispanic community, but Latinos honestly can't see beyond immigration.

Ramos went on to inaccurately oversimplify the Latino constituency by painting immigration as their "prerequisite" to supporting a candidate, which in his opinion would give Jeb Bush -- who has supported a pathway to citizenship --an edge with Latinos in the 2016 election.

Republican presidential-hopeful Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has faced criticism from Hispanic news media for his extreme conservative policy positions on health care and immigration, which are out of line with the majority of Latino voters.

Conservative media figures issued apocalyptic warnings and predictions about the consequences of passing health care reform. Yet in the five years since President Obama signed the bill into law, the number of uninsured Americans has dropped by the largest amount in four decades, insurers can no longer deny coverage for preexisting conditions, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare subsidies will cost $209 billion less than projected.

On the anniversary of health care reform's passage, Media Matters looked back at right-wing media's most dire predictions.

"The End Of America As You Know It."

In November 2009, Glenn Beck declared that the possible passage of health care reform "will be a nail in the coffin of America" and would cause the public to "all wallow in misery." Obamacare would be "the end of prosperity in America forever ... the end of America as you know it."

Beck later predicted health care granted Obama "the pieces the president needs to control every aspect of your life," including control over whether and when people can have children.

"All Of Us Will Be Slaves."

Rush Limbaugh argued in 2009 that Obamacare was "aimed at robbing you of your humanity and forcing you to bow down to the state." He predicted, "All of us will be slaves" because "the road to serfdom ... is paved in Obamacare."

"It's Going To Be A Bloodbath."

Radio host Jim Quinn argued in January 2010 that the passage of Obamacare would bring "an insurrection. You're going to see an uprising." According to Quinn, "Your taxes are going to go through the roof. It's going to be a bloodbath."

Reform Will Topple The Stock Market.

CNBC's Jim Cramer predicted in March 2010 that Obamacare would topple the stock market, arguing it was the "single biggest impediment to the stock market going higher." (Notably, the DOW and Nasdaq neared all-time highs in March 2015.)

No Care For Granny Because "She's Too Old."

Cal Thomas claimed on Fox News in 2010 that while they may not "pull the plug on Granny" due to Obamacare, "they will deny her care because she's costing too much and she's too old."

Right-wing media continue to push the myth that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) contains a "death panel" provision, and years after the birth of this smear, it continues to have an impact on public perception and find its way into Republican legislation.

When the House first introduced the health care bill that would eventually become the ACA in 2009, serial health care misinformer Betsy McCaughey falsely claimed the bill would "require" end-of-life counseling for seniors to "tell them how to end their life sooner." The baseless claim was later amplified by Sarah Palin and the notion quickly gained steam as the right-wing media echo-chamber championed the idea.

Despite being conclusively debunked as Politifact's "lie of the year" in 2009, conservative media still persist in trumpeting the death panel lie. In 2014, Fox News' Eric Bolling compared the Veteran Affairs health care system to the ACA, citing them as examples of "a big, bureaucratic, government-run health care system." He concluded, "whether you believe it or not, Sarah Palin and a couple other people on the right said there will be death panels. There will be people deciding who gets what treatment and when and that's just gonna put long waiting lines on certain types of treatment. Well, if the VA isn't proving that right now, nothing is." Rush Limbaugh, Fox's Sean Hannity, and other conservative media outlets trotted out the death panel lie last year as well, in the midst of good news about enrollment and reductions in the nation's rate of uninsured people.

The death panel falsehood is still reflected in both the public's perception of the health care law as well as the Republican legislative agenda. As Sarah Kliff explained in a March 23 post for Vox, 26 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of Democrats still agree that "a government panel helps make decisions about patients' end-of-life care" is "part of the law."

The myth even continues to make its way into GOP legislation critical of the health care law. The Washington Post's Stephen Stromberg noted in a March 22 post that despite having been debunked, "the GOP's death-panel nonsense still has hold on the party" and was "written explicitly" into the House GOP's 2016 budget proposal:

Experts and professional fact-checkers have debunked the notion that the Affordable Care Act would empower a faceless government board to deny critical health-care procedures, the Obama-era equivalent of pushing inconvenient seniors onto ice floes. But the GOP's death-panel nonsense still has a hold on the party, its illogic written explicitly into the House's budget.

Major Hispanic news outlets failed to cover a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which found that 4.2 million Hispanic Americans have gained health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act provisions have taken effect.

On March 16, HHS reported that 16.4 million Americans, including 4.2 million Hispanic Americans, gained health insurance coverage since "several of the Affordable Care Act's coverage provisions took effect."

But major Hispanic media outlets have failed to cover the report. A Media Matters study found that from March 16 to March 19, top Hispanic news shows, Univision's Noticiero Univision and Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna and Telemundo's Noticiero Telemundo made no mentions of the HHS report or the official ACA enrollment numbers disclosed this week.

According to NBC News, Hispanics are "the group with the largest gains in insurance" because of ACA. The New York Timesreported that the "proportion of Latinos who were uninsured dropped to 29.5 percent, from 41.8 percent," far greater than the decline for white Americans from 14.3 percent to 9 percent.

Information concerning the ACA, enrollment and the law's benefits are especially important to the Hispanic community and polls have consistently found that Latinos rank health care as one of the issues most important to them. But Hispanic media outlets continue to ignore health care as an important issue, despite the fact that Latinos still lead in the share of uninsured Americans.

Network Largely Ignored News Of Major Decline In Uninsured Since The Affordable Care Act Took Effect

Fox News cited an unnamed "independent expert" to cast doubt on the veracity of recent Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers, which have exceeded 16 million Americans and are reported to have driven the largest reduction in uninsured persons in 40 years.

On March 16, the Obama administration announced that 16.4 million Americans had enrolled in insurance through the health care law since it took effect. As The New York Times reported "Since the first open enrollment period began in October 2013, the officials said, the proportion of adults lacking insurance has dropped to 13.2 percent, from 20.3 percent."

But at Fox News, high enrollment numbers and a plummeting rate in those uninsured was barely mentioned. According to a Media Matters count, the network mentioned the 16.4 million Americans who enrolled in health insurance just once in the days following the announcement in an attempt to discredit the findings. On the March 16 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, host Bret Baier briefly reported on the enrollment numbers, offering the unevidenced claim that "an independent expert says the reality is fewer than 10 million people have signed up."

Fox has consistentlydownplayed and twisted Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers, going as far as to skew on-air graphics to misleadingly suggest less Americans were signing up for insurance through the health care law than had been originally projected.

UPDATE: The Associated Press reported that the government's numbers differed from those of "an independent expert," who concluded only about 9.7 million people gained insurance. The lower number was based on a survey by Dan Witters, research director for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, who "took into account insurance losses" during some of the years the ACA was in effect.

Fox News' Special Report promoted "GOP alternatives" proposed by Republican presidential hopefuls that would supposedly replace the Affordable Care Act if the Supreme Court strikes down the law's health insurance tax credits. But Fox's flagship program glossed over the fact that the GOP alternatives would not repair the damage and leave millions of Americans without health care coverage.

On March 4, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the opening arguments of the King v. Burwell case. The case involves whether the language of a subclause in the ACA, "Exchanges established by the State," could prevent the IRS from providing tax credits to consumers who purchased insurance over the federal exchange.

But none of the plans promoted by Fox proposed a way to help the millions of Americans left without a way to purchase affordable health insurance. As US News & World Report's Robert Schlesinger writes, the GOP "has yet to produce a plan encompassing the latter half of their 'repeal-and-replace' mantra."

Nevertheless, despite the lack of a solution for this potential human and economic disaster, right-wing media continue to baselessly pretend there is a fallback plan in the event this attack on the ACA is successful.

A RAND Corporation study released in February found that, if the Court rules against the federal exchanges, 8 million people would lose their coverage, and unsubsidized health insurance premiums would increase by 47 percent.

The Wall Street Journal called on Supreme Court justices to "vindicate federalism" by striking down health care subsidies in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but ignored the proven economic consequences such a ruling would have on the states, which has led the court in the past to refuse to inflict such harm because of those same federalist concerns.

At issue in the latest health care challenge, King v. Burwell, is whether ACA subsidies are available over the federal health care exchange website, which operates in 37 states. During oral arguments, Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed concern that the challengers' interpretation of the law -- which would deny subsidies to upwards of eight million Americans -- might be unconstitutionally coercive to those states that declined to set up their own exchange. This coercion argument was at the heart of the last ACA challenge in 2012, when the court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to threaten to deny money to states that refused to expand Medicaid, because the economic consequences would have been devastating.

In a March 5 editorial, the Journal argued that denying federal subsidies to states that refused to set up exchanges "is not the same" as denying federal funds to states that refuse to accept the Medicaid expansion. But in a brief to the Supreme Court, the states who have had to make both choices disagreed, and pointed out that the King challengers themselves had admitted this type of coercion was the same:

In [the 2012 health care challenge], the Court explained that cutting off all Medicaid funding to States that declined Medicaid expansion constituted "much more than relatively mild encouragement -- it is a gun to the head." It "crossed the line distinguishing encouragement from coercion," serving "no purpose other than to force unwilling States" to comply. In the court of appeals, Petitioners argued that the scheme they attribute to Congress was "the same" in its coercive nature as one invalidated in [2012]. In this Court, Petitioners prefer understatement, saying that "Congress could quite reasonably believe that elected state officials would not want to explain to voters that they had deprived them of billions of dollars by failing to establish an Exchange." Either way, it is a novel kind of pressure to threaten to injure a State's citizens and to destroy its insurance markets in order to force State-government officials to implement a federal program.

To avoid the comparison, the Journal also downplayed the likely destabilization of the insurance markets in the event the federal tax credits are struck down, echoing a false claim from the King challengers' lawyer, Michael Carvin, who argued in court that there was "not a scintilla of evidence" that the health insurance market would enter a death spiral without the current subsidies. The Journal editorial argued that "in the 1980s and 1990s, eight states including Kentucky, Washington and New York imposed the same rules -- without subsidies. In other words, the regulations are supposedly valuable by themselves to achieve liberal policy goals."

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is adopting right-wing media's talking points yet again, this time implausibly claiming that the Republican-controlled "Congress would act" with an alternative if the court strikes down the Affordable Care Act's health insurance tax credits.

On March 4, the justices heard King v. Burwell, a case that could make insurance subsidies unavailable to some Americans. At issue in the suit is whether a subclause in the law that says subsidies can be disbursed through "Exchanges established by the State" prohibits the IRS from providing tax credits to consumers who bought insurance over the federal exchange. Despite the fact that experts agree that the law clearly makes the subsidies available to everyone, right-wing media have called on the Supreme Court to rule otherwise.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell has repeatedly said that there is no contingency plan in the event of an adverse decision in King, and that there is no fix the administration can make to remedy the problem without inviting further legal challenges. Right-wing media jumped at Burwell's comments, criticizing the administration for not having a back-up plan while promoting a series of Republican "alternatives" should the court ultimately strike the subsidies down.

Conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have done their part to push these plans by hosting numerousop-eds and segments with the authors of these questionable proposals. On the March 4 edition of Fox & Friends, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) joined hosts Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck to promote one such alternative. After Cassidy claimed that the Obama administration has "nothing to say" to consumers who might lose their subsidies, Doocy remarked that "the administration says they don't have a plan B, but apparently the Republicans do." National Review Online has also argued that the Republicans have a viable alternative plan, writing in a recent post that "Senate Republicans aren't leaving anything to chance" and that "there's some conservative intellectual firepower behind" their ideas.

As The Hillreported, these alternatives are "a direct appeal to the Supreme Court justices" that are "intended to make it easier for the court to strike down the subsidies, since Republicans believe the court is more likely to rule in their favor if it believes a plan is in place to limit the fallout."

According to the Urban Institute, 8.2 million Americans, disproportionately women and children, may become uninsured as a consequence of King v. Burwell. But for right-wing media, pointing out the dangerous consequences of the loss of health care subsidies is nothing more than a "scare tactic."

The Wall Street Journal is once again promoting a right-wing challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by repeating misinformation about the case, calling on the Supreme Court to strike down some health care subsidies while falsely claiming the law's "plain text" renders them illegal.

On March 4, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, a case that could block the availability of federal health care subsidies. The plaintiffs in King argue that because a subclause of the ACA states that subsidies are available "through Exchanges established by the State," consumers who buy insurance over the federal exchange aren't eligible to receive tax credits from the IRS to offset the cost. Without subsidies, people who live in one of the 37 states that don't operate their own health care exchange would be unable to afford insurance.

In a March 2 editorial, the Journal made its final pitch before oral arguments, calling the challenge an opportunity for "the Justices to vindicate the law's plain text." The editorial, like the challengers in King, ignored the context of the ACA as a whole and claimed that the decision to strike down the subsidies should be an easy call for the Supreme Court because the "English language is clear" and the law is unambiguous:

In King, the High Court will scrutinize this IRS decree using the traditional canons of statutory construction. The English language is clear: Congress wrote that subsidies would be available on state exchanges only, so Washington cannot deputize itself as the 51st state -- especially when the black-letter law is as consistent, tightly worded and cross-referenced as the Affordable Care Act.

To take one example, the Secretary of Health and Human Services was empowered to grant unlimited sums of money to states to establish exchanges. But the law appropriated not a penny for the federal exchanges, and HHS raided internal slush funds to build them. If there is no legal difference between the federal and state exchanges, why did HHS need this budget ruse?

[...]

ObamaCare's history shows Democrats made a deliberate choice. As they tried to assemble 60 votes in the Senate, holdouts like then Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson intensely desired state partners. Because the federal government couldn't commandeer the sovereign states by mandating participation, the subsidy bait was Congress's constitutional option to encourage buy-in.

The Journal's attempt to make the plaintiffs' case by arguing that the subsidies are illegal because the Department of Health and Human Services had to rely on a "budget ruse" to build the federal exchanges ignores the facts. According to a report from The Washington Post, the Republican-controlled Congress "repeatedly rejected the Obama administration's requests for additional funds" to implement the ACA, including those exchanges Republican-controlled states refused to set up.

The New York Times was forced to issue two corrections after relying on Capitol Hill anonymous sourcing for its flawed report on emails from former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Clinton debacle is the latest example of why the media should be careful when relying on leaks from partisan congressional sources -- this is far from the first time journalists who did have been burned.

Several Fox News figures are attempting to shift partial blame onto Samuel DuBose for his own death at the hands of a Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop, arguing DuBose should have cooperated with the officer's instructions if he wanted to avoid "danger."

Iowa radio host Steve Deace is frequently interviewed as a political analyst by mainstream media outlets like NPR, MSNBC, and The Hill when they need an insider's perspective on the GOP primary and Iowa political landscape. However, these outlets may not all be aware that Deace gained his insider status in conservative circles by broadcasting full-throated endorsements of extreme right-wing positions on his radio show and writing online columns filled with intolerant views that he never reveals during main stream media appearances.